- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
An investor who expects the price of a particular security to rise; the opposite of a bear.
Industry:Economy
An annual procedure to decide how much public spending there should be in the year ahead and what mix of taxation, charging for services and borrowing should finance it. The budgeting process differs enormously from one country to another. In the United States, for example, the president proposes a budget in February for the fiscal year starting the following October, but this has to be approved by Congress. By the time a final decision has to be made, ideally, no later than September, there are often three competing versions: the president's latest proposal, one from the Senate and another from the House of Representatives. What finally emerges is the result of last-minute negotiations. Occasionally, delays in agreeing the budget have led to the temporary closure of some federal government offices. Contrast this with the UK, where most of what the government proposes is usually approved by parliament, and some changes take effect as soon as they are announced (subject to subsequent parliamentary vote).
Industry:Economy
When the price of an asset rises far higher than can be explained by fundamentals, such as the income likely to derive from holding the asset. The Chicago Tribune of April 13th 1890, writing about the then mania in real-estate prices, described "men who bought property at prices they knew perfectly well were fictitious, but who were prepared to pay such prices simply because they knew that some still greater fool could be depended on to take the property off their hands and leave them with a profit". Such behavior is a feature of all bubbles. Famous bubbles include tulip mania in Holland during the 17th century, when the prices of tulip bulbs reached unheard of levels, and the South Sea Bubble in Britain a century later, although there have been many others since, including the dotcom bubble in internet company shares that burst in 2000. Economists argue about whether bubbles are the result of irrational crowd behavior (perhaps coupled with exploitation of the gullible masses by some savvy speculators) or, instead, are the result of rational decisions by people who have only limited information about the fundamental value of an asset and thus for whom it may be quite sensible to assume the market price is sound. Whatever their cause, bubbles do not last forever and often end not with a pop but with a crash.
Industry:Economy
A conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, which designed the structure of the international monetary system after the second world war and set up the IMF and the world bank. It was agreed that the exchange rates of IMF members would be pegged to the dollar, with a maximum variation of 1% either side of the agreed rate. Rates could be adjusted more sharply only if a country's balance of payments was in fundamental disequilibrium. In August 1971 economic troubles and the cost of financing the Vietnam War led the American president, Richard Nixon, to devalue the dollar. This shattered confidence in the fixed exchange rate system and by 1973 all of the main currencies were floating freely, at rates set mostly by market forces rather than government fiat.
Industry:Economy
The stalking-horse for international capitalism. A focus for all the worries about environmental damage, human-rights abuses and sweated labor that opponents of globalization like to put on their placards. A symbol of America's corporate power, since most of the world's best-known brands, from Coca Cola to Nike, are American. That is the case against. Many economists regard brands as a good thing, however. A brand provides a guarantee of reliability and quality. Consumer trust is the basis of all brand values. So companies that own the brands have an immense incentive to work to retain that trust. Brands have value only where consumers have choice. The arrival of foreign brands, and the emergence of domestic brands, in former communist and other poorer countries points to an increase in competition from which consumers gain. Because a strong brand often requires expensive advertising and good marketing, it can raise both price and barriers to entry. But not to insuperable levels: brands fade as tastes change; if quality is not maintained, neither is the brand.
Industry:Economy
A theory of human decision making that assumes that people behave rationally, but only within the limits of the information available to them. Because their information may be inadequate (bounded) they make take decisions that appear to be irrational according to traditional theories about homo economicus (economic man). (See also behavioral economics. )
Industry:Economy
Gentlemen prefer bonds, punned Andrew Mellon, an American tycoon. A bond is an interest-bearing security issued by governments, companies and some other organizations. Bonds are an alternative way for the issuer to raise capital to selling shares or taking out a bank loan. Like shares in listed companies, once they have been issued bonds may be traded on the open market. A bond's yield is the interest rate (or coupon) paid on the bond divided by the bond's market price. Bonds are regarded as a lower risk investment. Government bonds, in particular, are highly unlikely to miss their promised payments. Corporate bonds issued by blue-chip "investment grade" companies are also unlikely to default; this might not be the case with high-yield "junk" bonds issued by firms with less healthy financials. (See yield curve. )
Industry:Economy
A formula for pricing financial options. Its invention allowed a previously undreamed of precision in the pricing of options (which had hitherto been done using crude rules of thumb), and probably made possible the explosive growth in the markets for options and other derivatives that took place after the formula became widely used in the early 1970s. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton were awarded the Nobel Prize for economics for their part in devising the formula; their co-inventor, Fischer Black (1938—95), was ineligible, having died.
Industry:Economy
If you pay your cleaner or builder in cash, or for some reason neglect to tell the taxman that you were paid for a service rendered, you participate in the black or underground economy. Such transactions do not normally show up in the figures for GDP, so the black economy may mean that a country is much richer than the official data suggest. In the United States and the UK, the black economy adds an estimated 5—10% to GDP; in Italy, it may add 30%. As for Russia, in the late 1990s estimates of the black economy ranged as high as 50% of GDP.
Industry:Economy
How firms keep out competition--an important source of incumbent advantage. There are four main sorts of barriers. * A firm may own a crucial resource, such as an oil well, or it may have an exclusive operating license, for instance, to broadcast on a particular radio wavelength. * A big firm with economies of scale may have a significant competitive advantage because it can produce a large output at lower costs than can a smaller potential rival. * An incumbent firm may make it hard for a would-be entrant by incurring huge sunk costs, spending lots of money on things such as advertising, which any rival must match to compete effectively but which have no value if the attempt to compete should fail. * Powerful firms can discourage entry by raising exit costs, for example, by making it an industry norm to hire workers on long-term contracts, which make firing an expensive process.
Industry:Economy
